We received quite a few comments on the survey along the lines of “Better and more reliable internet connection. Advanced notification of system downtime. Better response to system problems.”
Wherever there’s technology, there will always be some unavoidable system downtimes, whether they’re due to viruses, attacks, equipment failures, or even just significant upgrades. You can be sure that IR is looking to keep those downtimes as short and infrequent as possible.
Lately, IR has been making some significant changes to decrease the number of outages we experience on campus. The main change is the new campus data center. There is a MAJOR reconstruction underway (and nearly completed) to migrate and rebuild all the campus servers to a “virtualization model” with all new hardware and connections. The new data center should shorten the length of all unplanned outages, as well as having more robust hardware to limit the number of those interruptions.
It’s also clear, though, that even when outages are scheduled, faculty don’t feel that they’re informed about the downtimes. One factor here is that IR doesn’t have a single foolproof way to get in touch with all faculty members. In the past, some notifications were only posted to Bboard, which many faculty don’t visit. Currently, all notifications are being posted to the my.scranton portal, and as a result of the TAG survey, IR has been coordinating with the Provost’s office to send email to all faculty when significant outages need to be announced.
Sometimes, though, just seeing the announcement posted isn’t enough: “Make the announcements more faculty friendly – easier to understand.” So in order to be effective, announcements need to be clearer, and they need to focus on information that is relevant to the affected faculty. With this feedback in mind, TAG is taking steps to ameliorate this confusion. We will be working with IR to create faculty-friendly announcements, and have created this website with the explicit purpose of letting you know what IR is doing, and why, in terms that we all can understand. When IR posts announcements, they may link to our site as a way to share additional information with faculty.
If you want to be more involved in discussions about outages and notifications, subscribe to our discussion list (TAG-Discussion).
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